Your book is how long?

I was chit-chatting with a friend who asked me about the length of my books. I tend to have a word count goal in mind when writing. Like I mentioned a few weeks ago, sometimes that doesn’t work and the story takes on a life of its own. What she specifically wanted to know about, though, was the number of pages. This friend (like me) is a Kindle crack addict. She doesn’t want a physical book so she has no idea how fat the spine would be on one.
It became a tough answer to give.
As I said above I’m not a paperback fan. I’m a minimalist. When we moved to NC, I went through the puckwudgies bookshelves and had to make piles: store for my grandkids, pack, donate. {insert sobbing emoji here} Whereas I have so few non-ebooks that I didn’t have regrets over what I purged. 99% of my books were on my devices. My packing looked like this:

BTW that is like my favorite animated gif of all time. <3
I’m also ridiculously frugal so overspending on things ratchets up my anxiety. I don’t want anyone to pay more for anything than they have to. Before formatting Canvas I took a field trip to Barnes & Noble to look through how others had presented their material. Some authors have thick-spined books with itty-bitty fonts. Others have fat offerings with wide margins.
I encountered a writer who extolled that their paperbacks were more expensive because of the number of pages. What they would not say is that the beautiful graphics at the beginning of each chapter and the font specifications they used added to the page count and cost. Don't get me wrong, these books are a work of art. The presentation of the work is impeccable. However, if we used identical guidelines our costs would be comparable as would be the size of the book.
I’d originally formatted Daveigh (the thickest of all my paperbacks) using a higher point font than what I used before. Those fortylicuous-plus years I've been alive are starting to mess with my eyes. If I pick up a paperback there is no way of bumping up the font and pretending I still have 20/20 vision so I have to find my reading glasses. When calculating the cost of the additional pages my profit tumbled as the price charged to my readers increased. I couldn’t bear that. As it was, the price point moved past what I’d asked readers to pay for any other kingsbrier Quintuplets book because the word count was higher.
Maybe the dollar amount on the back of a book doesn’t matter at all and you’ll pay whatever it costs. Eventually, it may make sense to bring you glitzy, non-squinting books. Until then, I'm confident that I'm providing value for the money my readership is spending.

Happy Reading!

Ps. If you are looking for paperback versions of my books to add to your bookshelf they are available online at Amazon and Barnes & Noble.

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